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Reading Slashdot From Strange Locations

Posted by simoniker on from the back-of-a-volkswagen dept.

aarrieta writes "I was thinking about the location of Slashdotters around the world. Many of us read /. from our houses/offices/schools. But I guess there are people reading Slashdot from non-traditional places/sites (an oil platform in the middle of the sea, Antarctica, the ISS, etc?) But what's the strangest place you've ever read Slashdot from, or the most remote place you're currently reading it from?"

16 of 1,006 comments (clear)

  1. I'm writing this from Antarctica by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    But we only get Slashdot part of the day because of the satellite.

    1. Re:I'm writing this from Antarctica by Wudbaer · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Apparently yes. Some years ago a friend of a good friend of mine did an internship on the German South Polar station for about half a year. Apparently they had Internet (my friend IRCed with the guy regularly) but only for a couple of hours apiece because of the satellite.

    2. Re:I'm writing this from Antarctica by XenonOfArcticus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I can back this up. McMurdo uses a satellite earthstation located at an uninhabited island several miles south of "town" itself, which is on the southern coast of Ross Island:

      Black Island

      The connection is a T1 that goes from town to Black Island via point-to-point microwave. Part of the T1 is used to carry voice telecom, fax lines, and MPEG-encoded television from the US.

      Black Island was chosen because it can see (looking north) over the large bulk of Mt Erebus to make LOS with a geosync bird at the equator. See photo on the page, above. That's the dish in the dome, and you can see how high up the horizon Mt Erebus protrudes. McMurdo is at 77.88 degrees south, so a equatorial sat is still above the horizon.

      Pole, at a full 90 degrees south cannot see a real equatorial geosync bird. But, birds that are decaying in orbit become highly variable in the N/S direction, so they appear to wobble up and down on the horizon. When it's up, it's usable. There are no mountains or ground clutter at Pole, so it only has to be up a little bit. Geosync birds do not move in the E/W direction, so the dish only has to track up and down. A previous poster who described the dish spinning around to track the horizon is sniffing skua dung.

      I participated in a project to try to establish other lines of communication out of McMurdo via the NASA TDRS sats. I think I'm the sitting guy in this photo.

      Black Island is 'uninhabited', but people stay there for various periods of time to keep an eye on troublesome equipment. They brew a lot of beer there, during the down times.

      I was present during the season of the construction of the current dome and dish on Black Island (though I was not at BI itself at the time). During a critical period of construction, part of the dome was finished, but it still had gaps in it. A massive storm (Herbie) came up, and shredded the whole dome with 120+Mph winds, spreading debris for miles. A new dome had to be flown in at the last minute, and landed in a heavy cargo plane on the rapidly-melting ice runway. But the new system has worked very well for the last 10 years, and McMurdo has excellent connectivity.

      --
      -- There is no truth. There is only Perception. To Percieve is to Exist.
  2. IN INDIA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I read slashdot at an internet terminal at the foot of the Himalayas.

  3. Top of a 100' antennea by skywalker107 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have browsed /. more than once while tethered to the top of a 100' broadband tower.

    --
    My new title at the office is "Vice-President of Everything Else"
  4. Deep Underground by Leif_Bloomquist · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've actually read it from 700m below the earth, in a salt/potash mine in Germany.

  5. Scotland by AngryScot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    in the highlands :) on a 28k modem in a small house(hut) that belonged to one of my friends dad. there was only one power socket so we had to unplug the fridge to charge the laptop :)

    --

    All spelling mistakes are due to solar flares...honest

  6. Highway: Home Server + DNS + SMS + Email Gateway by jlcooke · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My cell phone provider (Fido.ca) gives me 150 free email messages a month which I can send out from my basic SMS enabled phone. I format an SMS just right and it'll turn into an email. I send this email to my an aliased email address on my home machine which pipes it into a perl script. I can request weather information, system uptime, etc. And yes, I can download the slashdot XML news page and parse it up, tokenize it into emails 160charactors long and EMAIL it back to my cell phone.

    "new SMS to 003436". "CMD S" for slashdot news command. 10 seconds later I get 2-4 SMS messages giving me the slashdot headlines. I've done this from a cottage, a highway coach, toilets in dingy bathrooms.

  7. The summit of Mauna Kea by igable · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I read slashdot before starting a shift at the Canada France Hawaii Telescope on the 14, 000' summit of Mauna Kea, on the Big Island of Hawaii.

  8. 1100 feet from the man by Sowbug · · Score: 4, Interesting

    August 2001, the middle of the desert in Nevada, while setting up my Burning Man art project. I was furious at myself for making a last-minute untested change to the firmware that killed the visuals, and now I had to reprogram 27 EEPROMs hanging 10 feet in the air by climbing a ladder and plugging a ribbon cable into each one and holding my laptop perfectly steady for 90 seconds while the flash programmer ran. It was a miserable way to spend an hour, and I was convinced I'd wasted five months of effort.

    About halfway through I remembered that 802.11b was blanketing the area and wondered whether I had a signal. Although it was over a thousand feet from the camp areas, the conditions were perfect. So I checked e-mail and Slashdot; odd how a geek finds comfort when he's far from home.

  9. Don't know how I pulled it off... by MoeMoe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This was a year or two back when I had an old Palm IIIc and a Nokia 8290...

    I was in the Bahamas and they didn't have any internet access... I could use my cell phone though I had to dial a special extension to reach into the USA... I rigged the IR port on my IIIc to use the IR port on my phone as a modem and dial out.... I checked my email, took a peek at Slashdot (or what I could see from it) and logged off...

    2 weeks later, a bill for $78.00 for overseas calls and internet usage... It was worth it for the koolness factor :p

    --
    Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
    A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
  10. Underground in a coal mine by axler · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've done work as an underground network administrator for an energy company that has a huge fiber optic network underground. There was about 1200 feet of earth above me, and about 6 miles between me and the elevator out...

  11. On a 386 laptop... by yeremein · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... dialed into my ISP with Qmodem 4.5, over the 2400-baud internal modem, using lynx.

  12. Stravinsky Fountains, Paris by cvd6262 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Between the fountains and the Pompidou center is a great wifi spot. I posted using my Zaurus regularly while I was in Paris for four months.

    I even met the guy who's point it is. He's on the third floor to the right of the police station. I asked him if it bothered him that I was on his wifi and he said, "Pas de tout" ("Not at all").

    PS - Go easy on him, turn off images while browsing.

    --

    I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.

  13. I have by 2names · · Score: 4, Interesting
    read /. from the inside of the cab of a 360 ton mining truck on my iPaq 4150.

    Top that.

    --
    "I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
  14. In a fire? by SmurfButcher+Bob · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My favorite was being stuck in a burning commercial warehouse. We were positioned with a two-and-a-half to protect a rather large fire-load (huge pile of pallets and several tons of lumber), while the fire rocked on the opposite side of the structure. We had a trench cut in the roof about 40 meters farther in, with the wood behind us. Our job was to wait, and make sure the fire didn't cross that trench cut... and also tell the attack crew to run like hell if it got behind them.

    So, we drag our line to where we need to be, mostly blind. We've got a thermal imager with us, so we can see what's going on, but most of the time is spent staring at... nothing, just smoke wafting in our faces, along with faint glow from the imager display.

    After about 10 minutes of this I'm bored out of my skull, and I realized I'd stuffed my IPaq in my shirt pocket before putting on my gear. The ambient smoke only allowed you to see about 4 feet, but the temperature was tolerable... so I whipped it out, and... detected an open wifi, lmao. So, slashdot is hard enough to read on an IPaq, but throw in wearing full gear with an SCBA in a medium smoke condition, it was probably one of the stranger places I've read slashdot. Had fun, though, I managed to get AIM up and send off a few lines to the wife.

    And no, trying to read it with a thermal imager doesn't work :)

    --

    help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am